Context, the feasibility study in 2018 was about 3.8 million ounces average over that first 10 years at about AUD 12.50 an ounce. So I think if we can get that close to 15, that'll be a pretty good result given the inflation, certainly through Australia. As I touched on, the loss of the permit or the consent was a bit of a punch in the stomach, and as I say, no one's more frustrated by it than me. We did everything that was asked of us and more. And it turns out, I mean, that this minor piece of administrative law was an error by the consenting authority, not us. So I'll touch on it in a minute, but the New South Wales Government are very, very supportive about helping us get it back and making sure that this is righted.
In terms of the go-f orward program, the intention is to re-secure the consents over the next sort of two to three months, or maybe three to four months. I can't put a definitive timeline on that, but we're sort of hoping March, April, and take this project through into FID and then feed towards the back end of next year. The reserve profile looks at the moment, it's about, well, the 2018 number was about 30 million tons. The project is very simple. It's low strip. The ore body outcrops. It's two million tons a year. And there's some very, very encouraging high-grade hits at depth along strike, which I'll go into later. So we've got plenty of options to see this mine life go beyond the 16-17 years that's in the initial plan. The project itself sits within a vast land holding for New South Wales.
It's about just over 2,000 sq. km. And then about 200 km to the west. We've got another 750 sq. km at a project called Tuena, which is literally 30-40 km south of Regis and McPhillamys. We maintain a relatively strong exploration program or exploration focus around our tenement package. And I'll show you the package after this. And I always said when Newcrest was around, if Newcrest owned this project, they'd probably be spending AUD 20 million a year on this land. It's a significant package with a lot of upside. The typical corporate chart, but really the point I want to make here is on the share price chart, which is the green line, that big drop in August was us losing our consent. When it was announced, I suggested to the board we'd probably lose 50%.
We lost 45% on the day, so it wasn't too far off. The reason I like to highlight that is because fundamentally we are absolutely convinced that we will get this permit back within a relatively short timeline, and so this demonstrates really the value of a permit in today's world, but also what the potential upside is from us getting this permit back in the next three to four months, hopefully. To assist with our re-securing of the planning consent, the New South Wales Government, as I say, they've put out all stops, and actually, three or four weeks ago, they introduced this amendment to planning legislation. They realized that the Bowdens precedent, which is what it is from our decision, has created some real issues with respect to New South Wales planning, and they're not really worried about ours.
I mean, we're a relatively small cog in the grand scheme of things. We're a relatively small cog. But our decision is potentially going to impact the development of 40 renewable projects with a CapEx of AUD 60 billion over the next 10 years. So this law is being changed. It goes through the Legislative Council over the next 10 days. This is really being done for the renewables in New South Wales, and we'll just slide through on the back of this with respect to enabling us to update our consent. One other thing, the other shoe that dropped for New South Wales to the benefit of us recently is that New South Wales has a high-tech metal strategy, a critical metals high-tech metal strategy, of which silver is deemed to be a critical metal.
And two weeks ago, they announced that for new projects, as of now, there will be a deferral of the first five years of royalties, which for us, looking at developing a project, looking at, you've eventually got to pay it, but certainly from a payback period and initial returns is very supportive. So we're very encouraged. The New South Wales Government are making, despite all the negative news or noise about the New South Wales Government, since we lost our consent, they've been nothing but supportive and are very keen to make sure this is righted. In terms of the project itself, look, just a quick map where we are, say, three and a half hours northwest of Sydney. So a great location. We're not in the desert. We're not going to be FIFO operations. This will be residential, 17-year mine life based on the current reserves.
With a 200 million ton resource, we think there's plenty of upside to see this mine life extended, whether it be through an open pit expansion or from underground. We've got the nearest town on the map there, just to the west, there is Mudgee, 26 mi away. It's a beautiful town. This is not a hardship posting. There's great schools there. Whenever we put a job ad out, we get inundated with responses. To the top right of that, there's a sort of a funny shape in our tenement holding. That is one of the largest coal mines in the neighborhood. Most of the employees live in Mudgee. They have to drive past our mine site to get to the coal mine. As part of our optimization study at the moment, I mean, our project will be day shift mining only.
So it's going to be a fairly desirable place to work. Just timelines, we've talked through those. So the optimization, the feasibility studies are on the left-hand side there. I mean, it's a very, very straightforward project. As I say, it's low strip ratio. Strip ratio in the feasibility study is 1.6- 1. We think we're going to be a little bit lower coming out of this optimization. A couple of things we've looked at changing within this optimization. Firstly, metallurgy. Originally, we were going to be producing two concentrate streams. We were going to be doing a high-grade lead with silver and then a separate zinc concentrate. The problem with that is about 80% of that silver, which is our primary commodity, was reporting to the lead concentrate with payabilities of 95%. We had 20% reporting to the zinc concentrate with payabilities of between 70%-80%.
So we're now going to a single high-grade silver bulk concentrate. Our grades are, the concentrate will be about 30,000 ton a quarter year. Grades will be about 6,500 g per ton silver, so exceptionally high grade, with 27-28% zinc and about 20-21% lead. What that's done is we get penalized on the recovery, on the payability of the zinc, but our recoveries on silver have gone up from 79% from the feasibility study to the best part of 85%. And all of the payability on the silver is now 95%. And two other aspects which shouldn't be underestimated. It reduces a lot of the variability from the mining process with mine scheduling. And also from an environmental perspective and a community perspective, the two concentrate streams had a cyanide component in the reagents. We can now exclude cyanide from the process.
We're very excited to get these numbers out there and get the study out there. In terms of the extensions, I mean, this excites us a lot in terms of everybody sees Bowdens as a relatively low-grade silver project, and it is by global standards. What gets us over the line is daylight. The strip ratio is the first few years, the strip ratio is less than one-to-one. Life of mine is 1.6-1. As it gets deeper, it narrows and becomes much, much higher grade. Now, we don't have enough holes in the underground in this high-grade zone yet to have a mine plan around it.
But as part of the next program of works, we'll be having an underground study to look at when will be the most appropriate time to bring a higher grade underground into that mill blend, into the mill feed blend. So we're very excited by that. And there are some pretty chunky grades there. And we're starting to see a bit more, we're starting to see some gold in that Southern Gold Zone as well, which is unusual for this system. To conclude on Bowdens, I mean, this is the largest undeveloped silver project in Australia. Despite having lost our consent, not for any geopolitical reasons, but through a technical point of administrative law, we think it is a pretty good place to be doing business. It's a large resource. There's considerable upside, both down plunge and across the tenement.
Optimization study, we're hoping to have those numbers out before Christmas. And our focus subsequent to that is just getting that consent back, which hopefully we'll have that in the next sort of three to four months. I just want to talk very quickly about the exploration. And this is a really important concept for us. The picture on the left is a picture of the Macquarie Arc, which is a highly metallogenic province, both globally and particularly for Australia. And the western flank of that hosts Cadia-Ridgeway, McPhillamys, Northparkes. I mean, there's some world-class deposits out there. We're on the eastern flank of this Macquarie Arc, which is massively underexplored. We own 80 km of strike of this. And the only deposit there is Bowdens. Now, I don't think that's right. There's a bit more cover there.
The yellow on the map on the far left, my far left, the yellow is the Sydney Basin, which is the coal measures. So that's all the sandstones which sit unconformably over the volcanics. And Bowdens was found just in that little green bit of the Rylstone Volcanics. We've just started drilling Barabolar, which is a prospect seven k's to the north. And look, I mean, it's a greenfields project, but we're targeting the edge of another collapsed caldera. This is the model type here. It was a stream sediment anomaly, gold and silver identified by CRA back in 1989, and no one's ever been back. Drilling started, look, I mean, too early to make any comments about it, but we're very, very encouraged by the exploration potential of this land package. It's massive, and it's in the right rocks for Australia perspective.
So look, fingers crossed that we'll be announcing something there over the course of the next six to 12 months, but there's certainly a lot of work to do.
Okay. Well done. Thank you very much. That was, thank you.